10 Awesome Trailers That Tricked Us Into Seeing Awful Movies

3. 10,000 BC

Though Roland Emmerich had lost some of his shine after the atrocious Godzilla and the middling The Day After Tomorrow, 10,000 BC looked like a departure for the director that was easy to be excited about.

After helming plenty of blockbusters set in the modern day, this trip to the distant past looked like a fresh start for the man, giving him a chance to muster some of that heart he found on Independence Day and transplant it into an exciting new setting that big-budget movies don't really explore.

The movie's trailer teased a creature-feature with an emotionally-weighty story and a new action hero for audiences to embrace, complete with a pulse-pounding score and several gratuitous shots of giant beasts attacking humans. That's always a win.

10,000 BC looked like it contained that beating heart that had been missing from Emmerich's movies for a while, but it never delivered on that.

While the director had shifted his focus to the prehistoric era, 10,000 BC was still the same loud, dumb blockbuster that we've now come to expect from him. The movie lacked substance and instead felt like a string of loosely-connected creature encounters, with no engaging threads pulling these scenes together.

Characters were cardboard, CGI was less-than impressive and the story was weak, and 10,000 BC confirmed what many had started to suspect; Independence Day was a fluke.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for over ten years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. In 2022, he took charge of WhoCulture and has grown it into the biggest Doctor Who channel on YouTube, and one of the biggest Doctor Who communities on the web full-stop. He has been writing and video editing since his early teens, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers, off the back of a burning obsession with the Matt Smith era of the show. Like many his age, he first got into Doctor Who with the 2005 revival, but has since gone back and fallen in love with the classic years too. If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order, or to give you a random factoid about the making of Gridlock, Danny is the person to ask!